The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards. In the context of data-centric development, the W3C focuses on building applications and systems where data is the primary and central asset. W3C standards ensure that data can be consistently understood and processed across different systems and platforms.
The W3C has been instrumental in promoting the Semantic Web, a movement to provide meaning (semantics) to the information on the Internet. Technologies like RDF (Resource Description Framework), SPARQL (a query language for databases), and OWL (Web Ontology Language) are part of W3C’s efforts to enable data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.
Why Companies Care About W3C: The W3C ensures that web technologies work together seamlessly which is vital for integrating data from various sources and formats. The open standards are literally the opposite of vendor lock-in approaches; and Linked Data (such as industry data from IKG) can be accessed and integrated with W3C RDF with minimal integration costs.